tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16339398767187739652016-03-12T10:28:28.006-08:00Behind the Kendalle AubraKendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1633939876718773965.post-64357147481334513062015-07-14T17:33:00.000-07:002015-07-14T17:34:33.222-07:00"ootd"<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h_bmTPTZabs/VaWgZZPnR5I/AAAAAAAAAWk/I9b8MrHnlaE/s1600/BoyGirl.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-h_bmTPTZabs/VaWgZZPnR5I/AAAAAAAAAWk/I9b8MrHnlaE/s200/BoyGirl.jpg" /></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2LQlfcAOf5E/VaWgZXBLR2I/AAAAAAAAAWc/-sZGKOY6OZ8/s1600/Burlesquey3.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2LQlfcAOf5E/VaWgZXBLR2I/AAAAAAAAAWc/-sZGKOY6OZ8/s200/Burlesquey3.jpg" /></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qpcD3dK3ddw/VaWgZbg4YSI/AAAAAAAAAWg/iKZNcFi7zSs/s1600/CodyLataneMeBerlin.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qpcD3dK3ddw/VaWgZbg4YSI/AAAAAAAAAWg/iKZNcFi7zSs/s200/CodyLataneMeBerlin.jpg" /></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A1C2PmsPcAY/VaWgaHMWFVI/AAAAAAAAAWo/42z29coLrVM/s1600/HappyCatLaundromat.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A1C2PmsPcAY/VaWgaHMWFVI/AAAAAAAAAWo/42z29coLrVM/s200/HappyCatLaundromat.jpg" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VnoHDkeLu30/VaWgaz-V7SI/AAAAAAAAAXA/38u6Olvt5cs/s1600/MeandBanjolinaJolie.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VnoHDkeLu30/VaWgaz-V7SI/AAAAAAAAAXA/38u6Olvt5cs/s200/MeandBanjolinaJolie.jpg" /></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zSspErfi5Ng/VaWgaGEHhXI/AAAAAAAAAWs/mZ_oSWRffMo/s1600/MeAndRenTankGirls.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zSspErfi5Ng/VaWgaGEHhXI/AAAAAAAAAWs/mZ_oSWRffMo/s200/MeAndRenTankGirls.jpg" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XZ0Px2zLNyg/VaWgacPUFQI/AAAAAAAAAWw/AmdAwH9rTyQ/s1600/MeVirginSacrifice.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XZ0Px2zLNyg/VaWgacPUFQI/AAAAAAAAAWw/AmdAwH9rTyQ/s200/MeVirginSacrifice.jpg" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AYxNaGrasXE/VaWgnGWgTZI/AAAAAAAAAXs/5RWcv45oHbA/s1600/IMG_0256.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AYxNaGrasXE/VaWgnGWgTZI/AAAAAAAAAXs/5RWcv45oHbA/s200/IMG_0256.jpg" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WlipT6jL7ZE/VaWgnlaKd0I/AAAAAAAAAXU/rZxKwU78Zos/s1600/IMG_0521.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WlipT6jL7ZE/VaWgnlaKd0I/AAAAAAAAAXU/rZxKwU78Zos/s200/IMG_0521.jpg" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BR7WIvGC2ic/VaWgnu54rKI/AAAAAAAAAXY/pj3Qn70teso/s1600/IMG_0868.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BR7WIvGC2ic/VaWgnu54rKI/AAAAAAAAAXY/pj3Qn70teso/s200/IMG_0868.jpg" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nk_qvOORhs8/VaWgooEnlCI/AAAAAAAAAXg/YkCX-I166iQ/s1600/IMG_0883.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nk_qvOORhs8/VaWgooEnlCI/AAAAAAAAAXg/YkCX-I166iQ/s200/IMG_0883.jpg" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9D5BbSHDso4/VaWg2CfOENI/AAAAAAAAAX0/ygT9JeB1TL8/s1600/Photo%2Bon%2B2-15-14%2Bat%2B11.32%2BPM.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9D5BbSHDso4/VaWg2CfOENI/AAAAAAAAAX0/ygT9JeB1TL8/s200/Photo%2Bon%2B2-15-14%2Bat%2B11.32%2BPM.jpg" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yI1A8Tgcwno/VaWhNjBLokI/AAAAAAAAAYE/qDMerNhizIU/s1600/CartoonHighSchoolParadox2.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yI1A8Tgcwno/VaWhNjBLokI/AAAAAAAAAYE/qDMerNhizIU/s200/CartoonHighSchoolParadox2.JPG" /></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VOz7WJnDpX4/VaWhNsTNJ2I/AAAAAAAAAYI/4KwcPwEa5_I/s1600/PastelYellowGal.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VOz7WJnDpX4/VaWhNsTNJ2I/AAAAAAAAAYI/4KwcPwEa5_I/s200/PastelYellowGal.JPG" /></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K0yPkzh1Al8/VaWhNS5OA2I/AAAAAAAAAX8/-G16JvLbyC0/s1600/Rainy-Day-Backside.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K0yPkzh1Al8/VaWhNS5OA2I/AAAAAAAAAX8/-G16JvLbyC0/s200/Rainy-Day-Backside.jpg" /></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ov3QsRdVJwI/VaWhN8dOpoI/AAAAAAAAAYA/WFDE9O1r0eA/s1600/SheElvis.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ov3QsRdVJwI/VaWhN8dOpoI/AAAAAAAAAYA/WFDE9O1r0eA/s200/SheElvis.JPG" /></a><br> <i>by Kendalle Aubra</i><br><p> And what are you today, my dear? <br>Princess? Pirate? Prawn? <br>To don that shirt, my silly girl <br>With patched and puffy brawn? <br><p>And what are you today, my dear? <br>Hair snarls, wild and free <br>Are you perhaps a faerie, <br>Or a charmer of a bee? <br><p> And what are you today, my dear? <br>With such affixèd frown? <br>Pagliacci? Peter Murphy? <br>Some other mourning clown?<br><p> And what are you today, my dear? <br>Independent? Grad? <br>You have the hats and habits <br>Of the dreams you never had. <br><p> And what are you today my dear? <br>Artist? Barkeep? Domme? <br>So many different costumes-- <br>Why the one that you have on? <br>Kendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1633939876718773965.post-74728804900270030982015-05-11T19:24:00.002-07:002015-05-11T19:25:38.665-07:00<!--BEGIN HYPE WIDGET--><script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script src="http://lookbook.nu/look/widget/7403890.js?include=all&amp;size=medium&amp;style=button&amp;align=center"></script><br /><div id="hype_container_7403890"></div><!--END HYPE WIDGET--> I like to describe this look as "female Elvis-impersonator in a Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome world." Yeah, I got a little Tank Girl to me, too--in fact I was shocked when I saw the film for the first time since I was 10 last January and realized that somehow I did grow up to be Tank Girl, despite regretfully minimal exposure to her. <3 My babin' bosom buddy Polina took this photo of me because I matched her entire room. Nothing feels as good as that kind of sisterhood. <3 <3 <3 <p><p>The collar is Polina's, too, actually. I just had to borrow it for this look. I have a flower barette from Las Vegas that, by some miracle, perfectly matches my hair and lipstick, but I guess I didn't get a photo of that. The shirt is from Collectif and I bought it in London a few years ago. The jacket is faux fur and faux leather, thank you, from Nasty Gal, where the fringe denim shorts were also purchased. The steel-toed boots are Miista. They're good for kicking ass and dancing. Kendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1633939876718773965.post-54104738691323911862014-09-20T16:30:00.001-07:002015-05-03T22:00:22.045-07:00Ode to Grange-Over-Sands, England<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dTvQXMyD5rQ/VB4NjeNIEFI/AAAAAAAAAOw/4uZNMj5qvkE/s1600/IMG_4790.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dTvQXMyD5rQ/VB4NjeNIEFI/AAAAAAAAAOw/4uZNMj5qvkE/s1600/IMG_4790.JPG" height="640" width="640" /></a></div><div style="background-color: rgba(205, 200, 250, 0.882353); font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.45em; padding: 0px; text-align: center;"></div><div class="p1"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">In the vaulted, heather morning, birds unknown to me do caw,</div><div class="p1" style="text-align: center;">Dipping down betwixt quick showers; silenced now, with worm in maw.</div><div class="p1" style="text-align: center;">Though the hour be unholy, still I find myself at ease</div><div class="p1" style="text-align: center;">With some semblance of well-restedness, above the gnashing seas.</div><div class="p1" style="text-align: center;">Yes, I may confound the locals as I stalk the glossy streets,</div><div class="p1" style="text-align: center;">Vested in my vibrant garb, with steel-toed boots and book of Keats,</div><div class="p1" style="text-align: center;">But I cannot help but smile as I glide, untouched by mutters</div><div class="p1" style="text-align: center;">Caressing every surface with my eyes and camera shutters.</div><div class="p1" style="text-align: center;">Yes, you’re quiet, yes, you’re tiny, gorgeous, ancient, silent Grange</div><div class="p1" style="text-align: center;">And in spite of this, I’m breathless—Is it really very strange?</div><div class="p1" style="text-align: center;">I coo and I adore you, though no one ‘round me understands</div><div class="p1" style="text-align: center;">That I’d like to sink my heart right into your voracious sands.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p1"><i>By Kendalle Aubra, 2014</i></div>Kendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1633939876718773965.post-30728002120055766612014-09-18T15:55:00.003-07:002014-09-18T15:55:54.983-07:00Push<div class="MsoNormal">And so they lived happily ever after. The end. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Their individual recoveries spanned a tireless circus of weeks, offering hope and growth on a tattered zoetrope left unwatched in your grandmother’s dining room. It seemed so circumstantial, so surreal—the escapist propaganda of the DMT released by one’s brain at that ultimate and penultimate moment of life and unlife, echoing silently through their brains like an overexposed television program in a dark, silent room with only the buzz of electricity lightly humming the soundtrack in prayer. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. . . . Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm… Click.</i><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Somehow, yet explained but yet unfathomed, they’d survived. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">But before that, it was chaos. As he gazed into her cloudy eyes he wondered if they reflected his own doubt, his own alienation from judgment, or if they clouded over with that quiet moment at the pinnacle of fear, in peacefully resistant mortal anguish, screaming cathartically at the edge of the precipice where her consciousness ended. The death of either was the death of both.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Nothing like the fear of mortality to put a little spring in your step. Heh. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Physically, he couldn’t handle the thought. It fell through him like a magnet through sand: anti-acknowledged, vacuous, rejected. It left a fuzzy hole tracing its downward and direct diagonal path from left brain to right mandible. It wasn’t an option. It was never suspected to be an option. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A tic shot down his spine and flung his right arm upward and forward, passively, warningly, when the thought hit him the first time. Eyelids clenched, he could just see his arm plummeting through the window, through her chest, right through her. He shivered with self-doubt and a salivating curiosity. That could be his moment, then and only then. His moment to give her her moment. Heavy-lidded eyes dared him without focus. She was ready; he could tell.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Really she shouldn’t have gotten him going like that. “But I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">want </i>it,” she’d wined in a slow, obnoxious crescendo like a mosquito. She was still attempting to light the broken cigarette lodged between two swollen lips and strands of blonde, tangled hair that cradled it like many maternal arms, or women mourning limply on the coffined bodies of their fallen soldiers. “Some part of me actually wants it to happen to me. That’s why I’m here.” She looked out over the rooftops, focusing, he thought, on a streetlight shining orange in that deep Parisian Midnight Blue. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">When she’d joined him in the kitchen she sat right on the windowsill, one knee bent up toward her elbow, the other dangling on the ground, holding her hair out of her face with her right hand while her left arm dangled out the window, garnished with the maraschino cherry of a cigarette. Hoping to ash it, she flicked it a little too hard. It snapped. She didn’t seem to notice. She reminded him of a little girl naïvely hiding candy behind her back, except for the sweat-streaked face, the smeared and blotchy kohl threatening to run into her eyes. It was, in his opinion, a gorgeous summer night; in hers, a miserable one. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">He felt distant, dangerous. “Look, Marley, I really don’t think we should be talking about this yet,” he warned her in a broken, raspy voice.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">“You’ve never thought about your own death? What it would be like if you just died, right now? You never thought about what the world would be like without and after you? Does it not bother you at all, or does it bother you too much?” The scrapes on her knuckles showed pink and fleshy against her filthy skin, emphasizing her pink, wet mouth as she brought the cigarette in holy sacrifice to meet her lips. A stripe of filth or make up was stretched along a segment of her nasal-labial fold. He felt it best not to mention it. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It was just like Marley to lead <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">him </i>to the kitchen for a beer, unoffered but trivial. His voice felt rusty, small. Marley paid no mind as he meekly cleared his throat, over and over, hoping to find his old voice hiding behind a clingy patch of mucous. No matter the effort, though, his voice just didn’t sound like it used to.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Upon opening the door, he could finally comprehend the peephole’s ambiguous shapes; she was standing with her back to him. She turned around, hair frazzled, face wet. Was it appropriate to ask her if she’d been crying? Maybe it was just sweat. It was an ovenly night; a slovenly night. A night like the hug he so desperately needed, quiet and humming like a doting nanny singing a child to sleep. So consoled was he by this night that he found it impossible, undesirable, and unreasonable to sympathize with Marley. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She’s always upset about something, </i>he thought. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I’ll have plenty of other opportunities to feel her pain and comfort it away. I need this night. It’s mine. </i>He’d remember thinking that, months later, and hear it echoing through his brain for the rest of his life.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Eavesdropping on his nasty thoughts, Time snuck quickly by and he sat in a waking stupor when the long-anticipated knock, frantic and sudden, jolted him mechanically to his feet. The knocking resonated in his sternum, in his throat, pounding tenaciously long after it left the door. He wondered at his anxiety to answer to others so devotedly when he could barely even answer to himself. Heart pounding disproportionately, he looked through the peephole, knowing full well who it was. He couldn’t really see what was going on on the other side of the door, though. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In any case, months had somehow passed linking days in an endless somersault of lightness, darkness, lightness, darkness, lightness, heaviness. Time was just another flakey bitch to him, really; capricious and unpredictable. Offended by the most unsuspecting things. He and Time were going steady, though she made a terrible girlfriend. 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mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style><![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <!--EndFragment--><br /><div class="MsoNormal">The heat of the night seemed to fill the awkward, yawning void left in his immediate environment ever since that terrible night when his mother died. Her lack of presence was what haunted him; he wasn’t haunted by her presence the way he often feared and sometimes hoped he would be. Sometimes he would take this personally and feel abandoned; then, in moments of clarity, he would stare into his hands and tell himself that science had always promised that there weren’t any ghosts. If anything, his mother’s spirit terrorized him far more when she was still among the living in her broken, feeble, angry way. She wasn’t there now to tell him “that whore Marley can’t come over here” anymore. He should have felt joyous, at least about that. He should have felt relieved. But now he felt lost, uncomfortable, unsure of just who he really was after all.<o:p></o:p></div>Kendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1633939876718773965.post-51730241971359601932014-07-09T17:52:00.001-07:002014-07-09T18:09:10.221-07:00The Crashed Car: Where Subject, Object, and Narrative Collide<div class="html_photoset" id="photoset_81372201249"></div><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SKSY6Ji89bU/U73VnuRPHFI/AAAAAAAAANU/sW2rz_VFids/s1600/18+TheFacialMutationsofZeitgeist.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://images-blogger-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?url=http%3A%2F%2F2.bp.blogspot.com%2F-SKSY6Ji89bU%2FU73VnuRPHFI%2FAAAAAAAAANU%2FsW2rz_VFids%2Fs1600%2F18%2BTheFacialMutationsofZeitgeist.jpg&amp;container=blogger&amp;gadget=a&amp;rewriteMime=image%2F*" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SKSY6Ji89bU/U73VnuRPHFI/AAAAAAAAANU/sW2rz_VFids/s1600/18+TheFacialMutationsofZeitgeist.jpg" height="427" width="640" /></a><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-K6XfCrCTnkA/U73iUbyEMvI/AAAAAAAAAOU/GXl3jhwMoOc/s1600/HubertFromBehindCar.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-K6XfCrCTnkA/U73iUbyEMvI/AAAAAAAAAOU/GXl3jhwMoOc/s1600/HubertFromBehindCar.png" height="424" width="640" /></a></div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I have often been told that my art isn’t personal enough. Mostly it focuses on a disruption of visual assumptions, forced visual illiteracy. I strive to transport the viewers of my work into a state of abjection, which Julia Kristeva defines as “the place where meaning collapses.” I want to liberate you (yes, you) from your ego, from your world defined/confined/relatively predestined by your acoustic images, your Platonic ideals projected onto your environment, supplanting experience with perception. One <br />versed in semiotics or hermaneutics would correct the old adage as follows: “I’ll see it when I believe it.” <br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8A-NBjCENPs/U73ZnvzZnQI/AAAAAAAAAOE/RK98D8Y1afA/s1600/DeerInHeadlightsCarFront.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8A-NBjCENPs/U73ZnvzZnQI/AAAAAAAAAOE/RK98D8Y1afA/s1600/DeerInHeadlightsCarFront.jpg" height="267" width="400" /></a></div><br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Those familiar with my work may have noticed a certain motif: cars—crashed cars, abandoned cars, former cars. Why? Well, a car in-tact is an object. It represents the basic dialogue of American values: new money, class structure, priorities, information about taste and family. But a crashed car is not an object. A crashed car inherently has a narrative. By merit of its gaping, goreless wounds, it informs us of the most personal, solitary, ultimate moments of its passengers—death, or a glimpse thereof. A crashed car is a relic, the skin shed by the snake and its death-rattle. It requires no gore, no remnants of humanity to make us pale and wince. We are simultaneously enraptured and revolted—indeed, placed in a state of abjection. We can’t tear our eyes away, queasy and horrified as we are. A crashed car is a subject—one that percolates into our minds, our chests, our throats.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VodM9ULeemw/U73Vq8gaR7I/AAAAAAAAANk/TeeHd7WW7g4/s1600/PopCarCrashFinal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VodM9ULeemw/U73Vq8gaR7I/AAAAAAAAANk/TeeHd7WW7g4/s1600/PopCarCrashFinal.jpg" height="480" width="640" /></a></div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Born and raised in Los Angeles, I have sometimes felt that a car crash is the manifest destiny of narcissists, klutzes, and the innocent alike. Cars are a method of transportation: car crashes are the same method of a different transportation. Surely, a pedestrian lying in the road comforted only by the DMT released in that ultimate and penultimate moment of life and unlife would see those staring headlights as lights ascending them to heaven; is this the rapture? And we, we all stare at the spectacle—the muse to the likes of Fitzgerald, Warhol, J.G. Ballard, and Cronenberg alike—simultaneously removed and utterly involved. It is an event we simultaneously understand and cannot fathom. It is at once alive, dead, and abiotic. So human, and yet so robotic. Surely this unholy union of man and machine sits comfortably in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley" target="_blank">Uncanny Valley</a>.<br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zq6nOUQTIlY/U73VotFpU8I/AAAAAAAAANY/asRsLX8WY6c/s1600/10_IMG_0901_2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zq6nOUQTIlY/U73VotFpU8I/AAAAAAAAANY/asRsLX8WY6c/s1600/10_IMG_0901_2.JPG" height="266" width="400" /></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; When I represent these destroyed or derelict cars in my work, I hearken to my homeland. But these rusted clumps so feared and fascinated also represent me. My car crashes are self-portraits. I feel similarly both objectified and subjectified—idealized by some and demeaned by strangers conditioned by a world of lenses and privilege. Passersby gawk and stare, simultaneously seeing my humanity and displacing me as an alien. One’s identity, to some extent, is carved by painful experiences as well as pleasurable ones. We define ourselves contextually, by reflecting or deflecting the <i>other</i>. You can’t see my rusted car guts and my bloodless dents, scrapes, and wounds. Not until I paint them. Not until I display them for you in a gallery, sprinkled with our shared existential fears like chopped nuts on a sundae.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MWu2SChSmm4/U73WTNZdaoI/AAAAAAAAANs/xvEss2nZGOk/s1600/IMG_3963.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MWu2SChSmm4/U73WTNZdaoI/AAAAAAAAANs/xvEss2nZGOk/s1600/IMG_3963.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></div>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; So don’t tell my my work isn’t personal. What could be more personal than death?<br /><br />Kendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1633939876718773965.post-87320145301820004592014-02-19T08:11:00.000-08:002014-02-20T10:22:57.426-08:00Why Hating on Hipsters Makes You Look Stupid<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-B8QFU7RJZTk/UwTXUiPyilI/AAAAAAAAAIA/DaAABGo71A0/s1600/HipsterHate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-B8QFU7RJZTk/UwTXUiPyilI/AAAAAAAAAIA/DaAABGo71A0/s1600/HipsterHate.jpg" height="322" width="400" /> <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> </a></div><div class="MsoNormal">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We all know the routine: you smirk condescendingly at the arty young adult with the glasses and the tattoos, or assume that everything he or she does is “ironic”—scare quotes included. You roll your eyes. You scoff. You make some sort of generalization on the way to your sweet new condo in Williamsburg: “We’re not walking fast enough for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hipsters</i>.” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>I laugh to think I might be the first to point out to you that if it wasn’t for hipsters, your snazzy $2.2 million condo wouldn’t exist in the first place. Who are you, dear reader, to talk shit on an entire subculture that you can’t even clearly identify or define while you yourself have been swayed to wear tight, high-waisted pants, oversized beanies, or large-framed glasses? Are you going to just subsume the elements of their culture that mainstream America okayed and then slander them to death for, say, growing their armpit hair, being vegan, or gentrifying the very next neighborhood you’re going to move into? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>I happen to think the general hate of hipsters indicates something much, much bigger. I don’t believe any subculture has been so antagonized since the first punk rockers—who, as it turns out, were doing something truly important, destroying and laying foundations for new subcultures to exist, that everyone might find a place to belong. Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols were famously booed off talk shows, spat on, and even exiled from England. Sure, they were “obnoxious” in their outright rejection of societal norms. Punks were unhygienic to an extreme that put hippies to shame, spitting in people’s faces and giving them pink eye (as happened to Siouxsie Sioux and Adam Ant). They glorified the Id, punching and pushing each other in mosh pits in clothing indicative of their subversive sexual preferences. They had outlandish haircuts and wild, self-aware make up that completely defied what the contemporary standards demanded: bad hygiene equals bad manners. Try and fit in. Comb your hair. Sit like a lady. Punk rock deliberately and loudly defied all that, giving room for those <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i>ed by society to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other </i>society in return—that is, a community for freaks to belong to cemented by a common abstract enemy: the status quo. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Hipsters are a breath of fresh air after the stagnant remnants of seventies through nineties subcultures. We all know punk is dead: it’s no longer rebellious, no longer menacing, and thus no longer culturally relevant. Goth is dead too, as it always wanted to be—trapped in a feedback loop of masochism, narcissism, elitism, and nostalgia. Rave culture is said to be making a comeback, but I maintain that “rave” is just another dirty four-letter word, a euphemism for a vapid and obnoxious trend with no manifesto but PLUR. The acronym has become a symbol for sketchy pills that dissolve identities and make everyone act identically trashy; stupid bracelets with rave pseudonyms spelled on them called kandy; parties with music so bad you’d have to be loaded to enjoy them. Rave culture never should have existed in the first place. In fact, remember the nineties all together? Remember Clueless and Britney Spears? The important musicians killed themselves or sold out, or just lost steam entirely. After the militant social pressure to straighten your hair, wear contacts, and have your ass crack show every time you bent over, the stark contrast of the hipster aesthetic—an acquired taste for me at first—stands for personal liberation.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Hipster culture allows anyone to rock an unconventional aesthetic. For the first time, boys make passes at girls who wear glasses in the mainstream. Hipsters never sought mainstream attention to my knowledge—they gained it just by being so outlandish in their “no rules” aesthetic. Hipsters pioneered the nerd revolution. They made it okay to be who you are, or to be who you aren’t if you’re riding that wave with any self-awareness. Anything can be cool if you both mean it sincerely and don’t take yourself too seriously.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Hipsters really began back in the forties, when white middle-class youths sought to emulate the black jazz musicians they so adored, but lost cultural relevance until about a decade ago. What’s so important about this subculture is that it has no agreed-upon definition. What is a “hipster”? Technically, when the term was first coined in the early nineteen hundreds, “hip” meant “in the know”, and the suffix “-ster”, like in “spinster” or “youngster,” was added to it to describe a person who fits in with the root adjective. So “hipster” means someone who is in the know. But what about now? What does “hipster” mean to you, today? Is it an aesthetic that you can compromise by disdain for people who transgress the boundaries of what is socially acceptable more than you do? Is it a novel attitude? Is there a manifesto? I live in Brooklyn, and even I don’t really know what a “hipster” truly is. I know one when I see one, but I couldn’t possibly define one. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">That, </i>my friends, is what I believe you find so annoying. It is a culture so free, so ambiguous, you can’t even put your finger on it. Anything goes. That is also why I know what the hipsters are doing is important. It’s such a dynamic subculture that I don’t foresee its stagnation so much as its transformation, just as it has been doing for the past several years. It has even revitalized dead subcultures heretofore mentioned and even spat upon, such as goth and *gulp* rave culture—though, thank my pagan deities, with irony, nostalgia, and beats at 1/3 of the speed. In fact, the sea punk idea of raves is refreshingly idealistic. It bears mercifully little resemblance to the horrible “Happy Hardcore” of my youth. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">In my opinion, hipsters seem not so much to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">know</i> what’s hip as to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">create</i> what’s hip. Therein lies their power, which you find so mysterious that you hate them for it. This puts them literally at the avant-garde. Your repulsion means they’re doing it right. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">So, to conclude, whatever hipsters are, they’re revitalizing our culture merely by making us question ourselves. They maintain dynamics in their ineffability. Perhaps this is because “hipster” refers to more of an attitude than an aesthetic with a rigid manifesto, but even then it vacillates wildly between ironic apathy and political dedication (veganism, body hair, et cetera). They encourage paradox and a healthy degree of hypocrisy. Hipsters are keeping American culture fresh—even you have adapted some of their aesthetics, albeit at least half a decade later. Really this reflects poorly on you, and not on those scapegoats bravely and haphazardly carving the way for us at the forefront of the battlefield of cultural development. Considering non-hipsters co-opt the hipster aesthetic, move to neighborhoods gentrified and made safe and desirable by hipsters, and throw the term “hipster” at arty people with the same calculated abandon that scaremongers threw “Communist” at actors, activists, and transgressors not so long ago, you look damn stupid when you hate on hipsters. Damn stupid, and damn closed-minded. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-B8QFU7RJZTk/UwTXUiPyilI/AAAAAAAAAIA/DaAABGo71A0/s1600/HipsterHate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Kendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1633939876718773965.post-32566650125341551122014-02-11T19:55:00.002-08:002014-02-12T10:55:09.653-08:00Unicorn Tears: When and How Offensive Costumes are Appropriate<div class="html_photoset" id="photoset_76362336495"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ex0rQdoe_1o/UvruqH-CvVI/AAAAAAAAAE4/-eEUetfI99E/s1600/IMG_3316.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ex0rQdoe_1o/UvruqH-CvVI/AAAAAAAAAE4/-eEUetfI99E/s1600/IMG_3316.jpg" height="640" width="480" /></a></div><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">A few weeks ago, a friend invited me to an event called I Feel … Unicorn Planet. Knowing everyone was going to go as a unicorn, I yawned, “How cliché! I want to wear something no one’s ever seen or worn at a party like this.” Therefore even I was shocked when I had the sudden impulse to go as a unicorn after all—a unicorn harnessed, on a leash, crying rhinestone tears (which, according to legend, can heal any illness). I made the entire fascinator myself that day with a horn I’d made out of cut, sand-blasted, heated, and twisted sheet acrylic; glow-in-the-dark ears of Sculpey; and some cardboard and fabric. I also added synthetic hair for effect. The costume incorporates a low-cut American Apparel onesie in gold, because pink is too obvious and gold is rare and royal, a pink and purple tail my friend Stace Cadet gave me at Burning Man last year, a soft white knit dickie found in the children’s section of a thrift store, wintery tights from Denmark, and MoonBoots that perfectly match the synthetic rope I used for my harness and leash. This way I have elements of the <a href="http://theflyingone.com/music-festival-fashion-sparkle-pony/" target="_blank">Sparkle Pony </a>aesthetic, but I have made the male gaze the subject of the piece. </span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">For me, to go in an immodest costume as a unicorn captured, tortured, and abused by humans perfectly danced the line of typical Burner culture and Leigh Bowery-inspired, DuChampian cheekiness used to recontextualize the costume and the culture it pertains to entirely. A lot of women even in the Burning Man scene sometimes wear costumes that are sexist without even thinking about them in those terms, or which are sexual but not particularly intelligent or opinionated. My costume is sexual but has a narrative, which forces the viewer to contend with him or herself on the politics of his or her sexuality. Is this young blonde girl in a low-cut gold leotard dressed as a unicorn in a harness with apparent tears streaming down her face sexy? Why? Am I morally at peace with my sexual attraction to her?</span><br /><br /><br /><a name='more'></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GsiWQx6l5H8/UvrwLrB2q6I/AAAAAAAAAF4/xlWD9DwgmFI/s1600/IMG_3323.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GsiWQx6l5H8/UvrwLrB2q6I/AAAAAAAAAF4/xlWD9DwgmFI/s1600/IMG_3323.jpg" height="640" width="480" /></a></div><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sxEDu1q8tdU/UvrvEnXkCSI/AAAAAAAAAFs/5e5MhZjo31g/s1600/IMG_3333.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sxEDu1q8tdU/UvrvEnXkCSI/AAAAAAAAAFs/5e5MhZjo31g/s1600/IMG_3333.JPG" height="400" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">With the lovely Marz Attack, who always makes her own amazing costumes.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">A concept I have often struggled with is the justoposition of Feminism and submission in the BDSM scene. I understand that acting as a submissive in a role-playing, sexy scenario means the scenario often plays a role too—the role of immersion therapy—whether or not the players are aware of it. It is a euphemism for trauma and a malphemism for sex. That’s right, I invented the portmanteau “malphemism.” Obviously it describes the opposite of euphemism: it is a word or phrase that makes things sound more sinister than they really are. Anyway, as I was saying, I understand how a feminist could be a submissive—but I struggle with where the Dom/me might stand on that issue. Why does violence against women arouse that person? To what extent is the Dom/me enticed by a woman in pain? Where is the end point? Where are the boundaries? What is the pathology? Of course, these answers must differ from Dom/me to Dom/me, but the point is that they get asked.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">I am a sexual person: most women are. Most <i>people</i> are. But there is more to my sexuality than my fetishes or caprices: my sexuality is innately and necessarily a political issue by merit of my gender, and I choose to hold the reigns. Yes, my costume is “slutty,” for those dense enough to slut-shame; but it transcends “sexual”: it’s psychosexual. My costume directly interacts with the viewer to create a dialogue about the boundaries of sex and morality, of nurtured fetishes versus natural/genetic fetishes. This tacit but direct general affront to the viewer is exactly what an “offensive” costume should do: it should not attack nor alienate any group of people, but direct attention to something taken for granted by the status quo and open up a discussion about it.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;"> <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Times; panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="font-size: 12pt;">Of course, complexity truly lays the foundation of an appropriately offensive costume. Even today, well into the third millennium, sex remains a complicated political issue despite its standing as a basic human function. However, this is still only one subject. Usually, my costumes talk about more than psychosexuality because I recontextualize pre-existing symbols to create them. My captured unicorn costume here, for instance, stands not only for a different psychosexual interpretation to each viewer as mentioned, but for a unicorn—an adored symbol of our pasts that decorated binders and t-shirts and pencils in early childhood.&nbsp; </span> My costume harkens to the permanent nostalgia we feel as humans, knowing too acutely that life, despite our best efforts, is not a movie we can fast-forward and rewind, watching our favorite parts and skipping traumatic scenes of humiliation. When my friend Paul saw a photo of my costume, he had just read a quote from E.M. Cioran's book <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo3617453.html" target="_blank">Tears and Saints</a> that says, "we cry because we long for a lost paradise." Legend states only a virgin can catch a unicorn; that if a woman only pretends to be a virgin the unicorn may not appear at all, or worse, may tear her apart with her horn. Thus "Unicorn Tears" becomes a <a href="http://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/homonym-homophone-homograph/" target="_blank">homograph </a>and a double-entendre. Until recently, I felt it more accurate to say only a virgin would waste her time searching for unicorns. The unicorn’s tearing and terrible horn stands for the disillusionment and harsh life lessons that come in adulthood.&nbsp;</span><style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Times; panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: .5in;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Times; panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1073743103 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="font-size: 12pt;">But recently, unicorns have come back into fashion among adults. </span> I feel that the Tumblr-fueled resurgence of idolizing pre-teen and sophomoric idols such as unicorns, kittens, dolphins, 90s rave culture, and cutesy cartoons like Sailor Moon touches on our alienated generation Y's stance where even emoting and relating is done through screens--not just physically but in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaze" target="_blank">Lacanian</a> sense. Our nostalgia and our distance form a fractal paradox, and infinite regress of abjection and desire. We seem to long for childhood--for permission to long for the absurd, to obsess over something fantastic or beautiful or idealistic, to wholeheartedly believe that we are the main character of a Disney comedy where we find out we have secret magical powers on our sixteenth birthday and our dreams come true, and we are loved unconditionally with only enough pain to make the story romantic. We want to believe, but the pain of having those hopes crushed by experience and life patterns make believing a vulnerable, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny" target="_blank">Uncanny</a>, unsafe thing to do. </span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">My costumes tend to offend because they bring up a lot of subjects that many people haven't sat with themselves and come to comfortable opinions or conclusions on yet. The lewdness of some of my costumes is usually one of the first things noticed and commented on, and we know our culture in particular has a very fragmented idea of sexuality, built on the foundations of Puritanism and haunted by the ghosts of Victorianism. We are raised to believe that a woman ought to be bestowed with the title "sexy" against her will and without her permission. If she embraces herself as sexy, she's a transgressive "slut." My costumes also seem to offend because they often incorporate cartoony versions of biological functions--tears, as seen here, or period blood, or once even semen--universal qualities in humans that we treat like shameful and alienating secrets, the discovery of which might lead to the collapse of society as a whole. Most importantly, my costumes offend people on a level they tend to have trouble expressing; my goal in a costume is to disrupt established symbols to such an extent that fallacies taken for granted by our cultures all our lives must be ruminated on. I seek to mediate our symbols of idealism with hyperbolic expressions of humanity. An offensive costume, in short, must be offensive to the conservative status quo because it attacks not a group of people, but a stifling pillar of propriety. It must change meanings. It must inspire questions. It may not have an answer, or even an opinion.</span><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">This means, of course, that costumes of rape victims, Nazis, and racist stereotypes automatically forfeit. They, in my experience thus far, do not engage the viewer in internal conflict on an unconsidered subject which pervades mundanity, but use predetermined symbols of hate to communicate more bigotry, more <i>other</i>ing, more objectification, spiraling into a feedback loop of metaphysical colonialism projected onto a group of already oppressed people. The only means by which such a costume could be appropriately offensive would be if the costume were to call attention to itself in its blatant ignorance: to recontextualize the piece to talk about something else entirely--most obviously, the fact that such costumes are mass-produced or worn, sometimes by people completely oblivious to their conceptual crimes. In short, costumes that depict a people as physically or existentially trapped or defeated with no narrative are not only offensive by nature but offensive without reason: offensive in their stupidity. If someone struggles to articulate why he or she is at qualms, and who with, in response to your costume, you’re more likely doing it right. Either that, or you should ask someone who seems a little sharper.</span><br />&nbsp; <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4m_cbETkP5o/UvrvDBrcHXI/AAAAAAAAAFE/2RQv6DJDzgI/s1600/IMG_3312.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4m_cbETkP5o/UvrvDBrcHXI/AAAAAAAAAFE/2RQv6DJDzgI/s1600/IMG_3312.jpg" height="640" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3EM4oAwksFI/UvrvDDifjaI/AAAAAAAAAFI/CXku1Kjya7M/s1600/IMG_3314.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3EM4oAwksFI/UvrvDDifjaI/AAAAAAAAAFI/CXku1Kjya7M/s1600/IMG_3314.jpg" height="640" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cU4g_xq-B00/UvrvDEUUR0I/AAAAAAAAAFA/ERsDB1PDte0/s1600/IMG_3319.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cU4g_xq-B00/UvrvDEUUR0I/AAAAAAAAAFA/ERsDB1PDte0/s1600/IMG_3319.jpg" height="640" width="480" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ALNxNl5TCbI/UvrvDy1O0sI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/ZLkKff4Sn8Y/s1600/IMG_3320.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ALNxNl5TCbI/UvrvDy1O0sI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/ZLkKff4Sn8Y/s1600/IMG_3320.jpg" height="640" width="480" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a_0AH8EBGRY/UvrvEBByXiI/AAAAAAAAAFY/gk04fhgOSEY/s1600/IMG_3324.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a_0AH8EBGRY/UvrvEBByXiI/AAAAAAAAAFY/gk04fhgOSEY/s1600/IMG_3324.jpg" height="640" width="480" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I'm taking the reigns on my own sexuality. Are you?&nbsp;</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />Kendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1633939876718773965.post-91457901596300766132013-12-10T20:45:00.001-08:002014-02-18T18:20:49.676-08:00Artist Statement<i>&nbsp;Ever wonder what my artist's manifesto was? Well wonder no longer!</i><br /><br /><style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} p.MsoHeader, li.MsoHeader, div.MsoHeader {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-link:"Header Char"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; tab-stops:center 3.0in right 6.0in; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} span.HeaderChar {mso-style-name:"Header Char"; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-locked:yes; mso-style-link:Header; mso-ansi-font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> <br /><div align="center" text-align: center;">&nbsp;Artist Statement</div><div class="MsoNormal" ><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" ><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>My art ethic is driven by an impulse towards disruption. I wish to strip visual and behavioral codes from their contexts, exposing them for the absurd and oppressive rituals they are. I seek the balance of education and anti-education, diplomacy and instinct. My prime focus is the fragile axis of muted, cultured brain-matter. I want to destroy basic and unnoticed assumptions, from the mundane to the abstract, to provide new space for unwritten and unrehearsed practices. I believe in hypocritical art—the art of multidimensionality, of the dogma of anti-dogma and the reverse, of concepts not yet verbalized, of life. I believe in an anti-alphabet, of Craig Owens’s allegory, which discusses the dichotomies of humanity and biotic matter, of instinct and inescapable egoism. I believe in an art which strips the signified from the sign and liberates the signifier. I believe in choice art—the closest I can fathom to free art—and free art—art I cannot fathom. I believe in art as objects, not art objects, and not subjects. I believe in shallow art, free from semiotic. Disrupt the acoustic image! Open yourself to an illogical synesthesia! Disarm and disword! No rules!</div><div class="MsoNormal" ><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Experience the art of psychological realism! Experience experience twice removed! Experience it anew. Non-stagnant art must, in the words of Susan Sontag, subject the viewer to its experience, rather than the other way around. I believe in counter-Pop Art, reversing the damage done by post-modern consumerist aesthetics. I believe in the arguably surreal. Let’s re-consider figurative formalism: a phantasmagoria of the concrete and the abstract both in content and in structure, a state of abjection, an unintelligible moment and activity, recognizable to resist dogmatic interpretation, physically implausible and yet honest in its depiction, spontaneous and cryptic, universal and personal. Specificity yields alienation—I am for an art which alienates everyone equally. I believe in an art for which language was not made to describe. I believe in an art which, fully aware of its objectiveness, takes place in the neurons of the viewer. I wish to destroy visual literacy, to strip you of your logical and local defenses. </div><div class="MsoNormal" ><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>Art as experience: involving, empathetic, honest, wordless, in which the wish for a conclusion may never be consummated. I believe in abusing camp for cultural and/or anti-cultural art. I believe in an experience more tangential than Pop-Art, less pretentious than Abstract Expressionism, less literal than Surrealism, as cryptic as Dada. I believe in self-referential anti-purist art, art with its own environment, objective multi-media installations of an un-objective truth. I believe in art as manipulative as literature, as obvious as dance, as formal as cinema. I believe in art of primal consequence—art that makes one blush, vomit, yawn, scream, laugh, stare, react wordlessly. I believe in the art of metalanguage and physicality. I believe in grotesque art, sex art, honest art, paranoid art, sensitive art, sterile art, smelly art, messy art, pristine art, uneducated art, spontaneous and abstracted art, microcosmic art, macrocosmic art, subatomic art. I believe in nonsense art and narrative art, temporal art pieces and theatrical art, almost invisible art. I believe in a vulnerable and invasive art. I believe in an art to catholicize subjective “reality”. I believe in art that does not claim to be any more real than any other experience.</div><div class="MsoNormal" ><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>If art is experience, its setting must be one of two places: the mind, or the body. I wish to externalize internal conflict, intrinsic self-consciousness, secret day-nightmares. I believe in the art of the human experience, whether depicted in the piece or experienced in its inevitable translation, of incoherent or dissected thought.</div>Kendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1633939876718773965.post-42754889951841980462013-10-30T07:26:00.002-07:002013-10-30T07:26:40.314-07:00Ghosts<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IUt-ZAyjwaM/UnEW3Msi9iI/AAAAAAAAAEE/SOuyqDTZPDM/s1600/Liars2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="345" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IUt-ZAyjwaM/UnEW3Msi9iI/AAAAAAAAAEE/SOuyqDTZPDM/s400/Liars2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><i>by Kendalle Fiasco, 2007</i><br /><i><br /></i>'Ere Dawn broke, and rosy finger'd<br />Stroked the sculpture of his face,<br />Lost was I in thoughts that linger<br />In this dark and dismal space.<br /><br />Time hath stained me with compassion<br />Yet I hardly can adore<br />How in a Plutonian fashion<br />Enter lost loves from before.<br /><br />Enter Mem'ry, enter fellows,<br />O ye violents, O ye liars<br />Midst the broken-bonèd bellows<br />Of my self-worth on the pyre!<br /><br />Speak of nights I still abhor<br />Or raise your sickly face to flame<br />That age-old wounds still scream in horror<br />At the mention of thy name!<br /><br />Send me swimming in confusion<br />With your practiced honeyed-speech<br />Linking horror to illusion<br />That my youth you still can leech!<br /><br />Lie to me now, screaming specters<br />That you earn your hateful keep!<br />Tears to alm you dream-infectors!<br />I cannot sleep! I cannot sleep!Kendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1633939876718773965.post-5882374089112654112013-09-09T15:38:00.000-07:002013-09-09T15:38:40.927-07:00Silence versus the Silver Screen Psychosis<div style="text-align: center;">By Kendalle Fiasco</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gAkkIvToM-Y/Ui5MKU4SFbI/AAAAAAAAADQ/9Ha5EJQwsek/s1600/PanicMadonna.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="640" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gAkkIvToM-Y/Ui5MKU4SFbI/AAAAAAAAADQ/9Ha5EJQwsek/s640/PanicMadonna.jpg" title="Panic: Madonna by Kendalle Fiasco" width="447" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><style><!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --></style> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">“Yeah, we’re just going across the bridge, please,” Brett says as I shut the heavy door behind me. I am inundated by the stink of leather. The driver turns on his meter. “So if you could just take Roebling, that would be fine.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Our faceless chauffeur swings his heavy foot on the accelerator; the telescreen snaps to life. “Hey you! Yeah, you! The one in the back of the cab!” beckon Regis and Kelly, our impersonally familiar friends, flirting, waving, winking, and engaging us. “Be sure and buckle up!” We’re sucked in, just like that. They don’t interact with each other so much as they interact with our presence, maintaining uncanny eye contact, nodding with each spoken syllable, hoping to be the first one picked to be on our team. Kelly’s entire presence is parasitical, tacitly expressing an empathetic knowledge, a mix between an innocent young girl and the foolish but kindly mother who believes she knows best. Their Rosencrantz and Guildenstern act ends with a punch line, and zap! New setting, new speaker, new informal friendliness. Image chases image, shadow chases shadow. Interviews. Archeological digs. Meteorology. Shopping, dining, hot deals, New York City. They care about us. They’re involved in our lifestyles. They want us to save money, to eat well, to bundle up for the coldest weekend of the season. What perfect creatures, with their tiny, unblemished faces, their maternal caring, their approachable demeanors! They’re alluring, they’re seductive, and they want to talk to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">me. </i></div><a name='more'></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>We hit a bump, and I come to attention. “God damn it, Brett! We’re still in Brooklyn!” Sure enough, the meter’s still running, and the anonymous neophyte Brooklynite behind the bulletproof glass meanders speedily and pointlessly through the icy streets. We’re cradled in the belly of his two-ton steel beast. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Stunned that we seem to have missed the entrance to the bridge for the third consecutive time, Brett shouts, “Turn off the meter right now, or we’re getting into another cab.” But his words trail off in a sudden lack of aggression as the words “Restaurant Week” flash before our eyes, advertising happy customers. A woman smiles coyly at her date. Succulent sauce is drizzled delicately on a slab of animal carcass. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Lucky for us, meat repulses me; I hit the patch of telescreen that reads “Off.” But before we can gasp with relief, the blackout, the millisecond of silence is immediately replaced again by those familiar, smiling faces, the chocolate mousse, the youth, the romance, the decadence. The siren’s song is so warm, so captivating, so beguiling. Beautiful dreams I don’t even have to conjure up myself. I force myself to look up and hit the “Off” button again. Again, the screen zaps automatically back to life, immortal, tenacious, mesmerizing. I’m feeling warm and narcoleptic. Brett hits the selected spot with an icy precision: finally, the screen goes black—well, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mostly </i>black, except for the ads for Taxi TV. Finally. Silence. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>It strikes me, suddenly, that silence has become a rare and perhaps mythical creature. I have noticed, as George Steiner points out in “The Uncommon Reader”, that even my thought patterns have been reduced to ceaseless noise, to my detriment. Steiner is feeling disturbed; he’s noticed that contemporary education has lost its emphasis on memory, that the youth prove resistant to emote, that the classics have become a specialized study wherein a formal education is necessary to understand just one line of the literary genius of Milton, Dante, Chaucer, Voltaire. And silence assumes the rarity and unattainability of a luxury item, shut out in its commodification. What with the introduction of on-demand music and computers whose memory we can rely on instead of our own brains, Steiner declares that we have become vulgar, inattentive, and in some senses illiterate. Our ability to remember has atrophied, the pathway to our own thoughts and concentration severed by screeching sirens, singing TVs, radio jingles, canned laughter, and extrapolated onomatopoeias of all varieties. Songs and catch phrases blasted ceaselessly at all hours carve the riverbed our conscious and subconscious thoughts flow through, narrowed, restricted, helpless. Our impulses, our opinions, and our identities are adjusted against our wills by all modes of technology. Noise is brainwashing us. We have also ceased, as a culture in general, to read—and thus, to respond, to encounter, to think. “To read well,” Steiner states, “is to be read by that which we read. It is to be answerable to it” (221). </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Once, man confronted book as though approaching a semiophore—a lexicon of symbols that demands active reading and dedicated response. Now, footnotes consume the page; the staples and paradigms of our culture have become arbitrary and inane. Man once used books as an investment, monetarily and personally, that a private collector could encounter it in a summoning of other-worldly wisdom. In reading, Steiner states, “his own existence ebbs. His reading is a link in the chain of performative continuity which underwrites—a term worth returning to—the survivance of the read text” (219). Man meditated, historically, on the written word. Steiner implies that man was then in touch with his own idea of truth, with his own postulations on the genius of others, with the transcendental nature of literature—maps to a higher consciousness we can only decode and glimpse at through words, or through the ineffable experience of high art. But with the endless buzz, hum, and roar of Industrialism and Modernism; the development of record players, stereos, recorded music, and telephones of Modernism and post-Modernism; and finally the invention and advocation, the ritual, habitual, and hysterical addiction to television, cellular phones, and the internet; silence has been eaten up by spectacular technology, which enforces a perennial distraction from man’s confrontation with real life, with the transcendental, with the ineffable, and even with his self. “It will require future historians of consciousness,” Steiner bitterly declares, “to gauge the abridgements in our attention span . . . brought on by the simple fact that we may be interrupted by the ring of the telephone, by the ancillary fact that most of us will . . . answer the telephone, whatever else we may be doing” (228-229). What we need is silence; and Steiner postulates that “[this] order of silence is, at this point in western society, tending to become a luxury”, deepening the gap between academic possibilities of those who can afford silence, and those who cannot (228). It will belong, he predicts, “increasingly, to the specialized few. The price of silence and solitude will rise” (229).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Manhattan displays its luminescent jewelry in the awkward, buzzing pseudo-silence of the cab among cars on the road. I want to say something, but my thoughts have escaped me. I think vaguely about the couple from the telescreen, wordlessly, inanely. Brett coughs, and like a dream, the situation is gone, the characters insignificant and forgotten. We inhale the hum of the engine, awake, alert, hearts pounding as if startled from a peaceful sleep. He squeezes my hand again. Already, this time, I’m too lost in thought to squeeze back. How did we get here? What happened? </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>It seems that the bonus of having been raised without television hardly inoculates me from the grip of the telescreen. I call it the “telescreen” because, like in Orwell’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1984</i>, one can’t turn it off, hide from it, or ignore it. It’s a mutated strain of the deadly TV. Its uninvited, parasitical screeching, its obnoxious, attention-mongering lack-of-personalities offend me to the core of my being. I hate them because they’re cheap, cartoony exaggerations and understatements of humanity. I hate them because they try to tell me what to do. And I especially hate them because I can’t tune them out anymore. They are eating my life force, sucking my youth away in someone else’s mass-communicative wet dream. They are the meta-fascistic mascots that invite you “in” to a voyeuristic world of screen-attachment and screen-detachment, the manifest daydreams that act out the ambitions and impulses we are too cowardly to act upon ourselves. They are maleficent mirages that sing songs of friendship and wean us on narcotic alienation. They censor your thoughts by blocking your access to them. It seems there is a fine line between meditation and brainwashing. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>In fact, meditation and brainwashing feel so similar because one attains a sudden existence beyond identity, a dropping of the ego. The most integral difference, of course, is that meditation involves one’s encounter with one’s wordless thoughts and existence and requires silence, whereas the other forces a dropping and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mediation</i> of identity by imposing other values on a subject through psychologically aggressive means. In psychology, brainwashing falls under the category of “social influence.” Social influence describes the multitude of incidents every minute of every day that might alter one’s morals, attitudes, or behaviors. It provides the context in which we define and refine our identities through opposition or assumption. There are three defined approaches to brainwashing: compliance, persuasion, and education. Compliance concerns itself with changing not the subject’s attitude or beliefs, but his behavior, via what is termed “the ‘Just Do It’ approach.” Does that slogan sound familiar? The second approach, persuasion, aims to change the subject’s attitude with the same message that smiling girl on her dinner date, that Regis and Kelly were slowly clearing my thoughts, my sense of self, to tell me: do it as a favor to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">yourself</i>. A third approach, “education” or “propaganda,” aims to convince the subject to “do it because it’s the right thing to do.” Successful brainwashing requires these named social influences as well as “the complete isolation and dependency of the subject,” according to the health article “How Brainwashing Works” by Julia Layton (1). In addition, “the agent . . . must have complete control over the target . . . so that sleep patterns, eating, using the bathroom and the fulfillment of other basic human needs depend on the will of the agent” (1). </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">In the brainwashing process, “the agent systematically breaks down the target’s identity to the point where it doesn’t work anymore” (1). The fragile state inherently concealed by an identity, exacerbated by the conniving cultural implications of television—especially a television you can’t turn off in a situation you can’t escape, such as the telescreen in the taxi—seems to make one exceedingly susceptible to such social influences and behavioral modifications. To deprive one of the opportunity of thoughtlessness without social influence guarantees such ego-tweaking. And according to Lacanian psychology, to replace one identity-induced psychosis with another in a society of ceaseless, fear-based ad campaigns cannot prove too difficult. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>To understand fully what I mean by using the terms “identity” or “ego” and “psychosis” interchangeably, we must first establish an understanding of Lacan’s interpretation and expansion of Freudian psychology, since Freud invented the term “ego” and the practice of psychoanalyzing individuals and their relation to mass society. Lacan’s theories, postulated during the horrific rise of post-Industrialism and Modernism and based somewhat on personal encounters with the disturbed, id-obsessed Surrealists, offer a striking and uncanny insight into our inner selves. Because of his awareness of the changes Modernism has imparted on his life and world-view, contemporary readers can ascertain a sudden awareness of Modernism’s impacts, which have exacerbated our dialectical processes of self-identification in its use of world-time and global communication. Understanding the cultural implications of mass-communication is integral to understanding how the technological advances brought on by Modernism changed man’s relation to himself, and to the world beyond him. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>In a lecture delivered in 1949, Jacques Lacan pinpoints the stage in cognitive human development when an infant first recognizes himself in the mirror. He expands on James Baldwin’s theory that an infant may first accomplish this recognition at six months, and adds that for the first time he apperceives himself and his relation to his image and environment. This act is a considerable stage in the act of intelligence: the child not only recognizes his image in the mirror, but, for the first time, develops an identity and a sense of self. Lacan refers to this stage as “the mirror-stage.” The mirror-stage entails the personal foundation of what he calls the “imago,” or what the infant perceives as his idealized identity’s destiny, based on his earliest, most formative experiences. The infant establishes his relationship with his self and that relationship with his environment, hoping to build his identity toward his imago. As the child grows older and begins to experience his identity’s contrast with those of other identities and opposing forces, his identity changes. That is to say, a “deflection of the specular <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I </i>in the social <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i>” mediates his identity, and he learns to censor his desire for the id (“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I </i>as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” 4). In this process, the child loses what Lacan calls the “fragmented body”, or the self before one dons the “armor of an alienating identity” in a neurotic search for safety and a sense of belonging (4). The child substitutes his fragmented body for an ever-flux ideal. The civilized West calls this process of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">breaking and modifying identities</i> “maturation.” </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">In light of the mirror-stage, I cannot suppress the question: what happens when we present the child not with a mirror, but with a TV screen? The fragmented body is further alienated and tainted by ceaseless distractions beyond the control of the individual. Furthermore, if brainwashing implements social influence to successfully break down the subject’s identity, I propose that silence qualifies as a basic human need: if silence is smothered by the constant social influences of post-modern technology, one can never enjoy thoughtlessness through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">meditation.</i> One can only partake in thoughtlessness through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mediation.</i>(A lack of thoughtlessness altogether alienates the body from the mind.) I do believe that television influences one’s sense of morality by providing identity paradigms and having them speak for what they supposedly believe in, be it pro-politician propaganda, an emphasis on traditional marriage, an alienating dynamic between political correctness and bigotry, or an utter lack of ethical response to sweatshop-made clothing and exploited third-world countries. All of this social influence dances ceaselessly in every corner of Western society, and subsequently every crevice of the Western mind. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I maintain that the common unattainability of silence and the cultural psychosis of mediated identities is no coincidence. I believe an easily manipulated and governable people results from a culture that literally can’t afford to think. As the flat-screen universe evolves over time, silence becomes less attainable, less needed, less sought-for—the silence in which man must involve himself, in an encounter with dense and lofty text (or even his own thoughts) to confront, define, and conquer his demons. Yet we refuse, as a culture, to take that medicine for fear of its bitter taste. In view of Western pop culture, Thomas de Zengotita illustrates our increasing inability to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cope </i>with silence, to cede the spectator’s position as center of the universe, to recognize the spontaneous placement of non-commercial matter and the realistic cause-and-effect status of life.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">In his essay, “Attack of the Superzeroes,” de Zengotita traces the impacts of technology not on silence, but on the general conception of the self. The basic role of consumer technology, he argues, constitutes recording intense historical events with minor trauma, sparing the rod to spoil the child on subjects including the assassination of Kennedy and World War II. But, according to de Zengotita, the omnipresence of television, not merely in our immediate surroundings, but documenting every event from multiple angles, gives the viewer a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You Are There </i>mentality (as was non-coincidentally the title of an early popular TV show), thereby including him or her in every historic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">or</i>spectacular event in the world, instantaneously. Everyone, resultantly, feels present for the funeral of Princess Diana, the attack on the World Trade Center, and is even given a “God’s-eye view” from the comfort of his or her living room (138). The tendency of the media to so subliminally flatter the viewer gives her a sense of centrality, a hub of mutual attention. And even de Zengotita agrees that the “alchemy that fuses reality and representation gets <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">carried</i> into our psyches by the irresistible flattery that goes with being constantly addressed in such fabulous ways” as we mediate our identities to assume the media’s identities (139). </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">As a result, the spectator has developed an etiquette of emotionalism based on the contemporary practice of “being in the moment” demonstrated by pop culture and endorsed by therapy and Method Acting. As spectators, however, “being in the moment” entails not quite genuinity, but TV-ready exhibitionism of emotions, dramatically proclaiming the blaring lie: “I AM HERE.” </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">De Zengotita states that “the hidden blandishments of representation implanted a sense of entitlement, an envy, a desire for public significance commensurate with our unconscious sense of centrality. Celebrities held a monopoly on the most scarce and precious resource in a mediated society: attention” (140). These practices, which we have been raised and weaned on, “[precipitate] a fusion of the real and represented, a culture of performance that ultimately constitutes a quality of being, a type of person—the mediated person” (138). We push toward an ever-changing imago, and, relating more to the screen than to the mirror, our perceived relationship to our environments, which only exists in cyberspace, warps our egos. We believe ourselves to be the star of the show, the center of the human universe, the identity-shield that mediates our external environments and our uncanny interior selves. We develop, in this way, a deep cultural psychosis. One identifies with the pre-established identities of the screen instead of the mirror, with bodies other than one’s own. Perhaps we ought to replace the televisions and telescreens with the mirror again—any figurative kind of mirror. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>It is my personal opinion that Mayor Bloomberg had those repugnant imitations of windows, of life, installed in taxis to distract you from conniving, conveniently “lost” drivers. The frustration I feel when affronted by these monstrosities is like that of a junkie in withdrawal—I am anxious in their presence if I’m unable to see them, to experience them, to breathe it all in, even though it is a practice to which I am not accustomed. My sudden lack of self-control is frightening. I become paranoid: the government is feeding me visceral drugs. It’s mainlining them into my eyes. But when the screen is off, then there is no screen; no fantasy world, no toxic snooping. I can evade it with ease—as long as it remains out of my reach, my eyesight, my earshot. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The only other technological development which has affected me thus is MySpace. Something about the filtered development and exposure of identity enticed me far too thoroughly as a teenager—only flattering photos, witty retorts, esteemed opinions, transcendental charisma secretly devised and meditated on for hours before gracing the screen with my puerile qualities, my utopian self, my censored, manipulated e-dentity. It became easy, too easy to become . . . to become . . . to become one of those flawless, sexy, winking, flirting, cavorting, screeching sirens of the telescreen and its kin. My e-dentity wasn’t a spectator—it was the aggressively spectated. It put me in power of timelessness. Reduced to two dimensions, I am the Wizard of Oz. Every profile on the network is that of the Wizard of Oz. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>But, like television, MySpace does more than induce and secure psychosis. It encourages—thrives on—toxic, obsessive voyeurism in what de Zengotita calls “a Panopticon of representation” (140). One can torture one’s self with the filtered images of competition, speculate about a friend’s contacts, read too deeply into a cryptic message on one’s lover’s profile. With foundationless narcissism comes extreme insecurity. With extreme insecurity comes paranoia, jealousy, web-stalking. One begins to thrive on life-consuming drama. One begins to wilt, forgotten, behind some remote and desolate screen. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">One forgets one’s self; one forgets to think. One’s capacity for logic, meditation, self-knowledge atrophies. One loses one’s life to the dream on the screen. Every single one. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">Are we not often enough bombarded with excuses not to think? Silence itself ebbs to the outskirts of civilization. Our roots, our culture, our connections to ourselves and our universe grow ambiguous and are forgotten. We no longer participate in physical, human society. We flatten ourselves to predictable, definitive drones. In so doing, culture becomes a post-Modern, post-Industrial wasteland. And we become pawns for higher powers, unexposed to the rays of the celebrity narcissism and silver-screen psychosis that we, the masses, have only even tasted. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Crushing, I know. But there is a solution, my friends, and though comparatively masochistic and disciplinarian, it is utterly attainable. I came to these conclusions one night in an identity-mongering fit of horrific reckoning, and I thought it destroyed me. Yet here I am, and existence is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> inane. Rather, it doesn’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">have</i>to be. But do you exist if you live your life in other people’s fantasies?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">I suggest you cut some cords, pull some plugs, and take the mirror image not for what it lacks in an aspiring conformity to standardized beauty, but for what it offers you. I suggest you detach yourself from your expectations and your movie-script monologue when you practice “being in the moment.” I propose you leave your defined, confined, and comfortable living space, immerse yourself with nature, retain contact with your unthinking side—your body, your instincts, those capricious waves of wordless understanding before that meta-fascistic “little voice in your head” dictates them in words stigmatized with historical abuse. Western artists focus, lately, on invasive art, that the viewer, the subject, may be placed in a state of abjection, at the border of sense, intrigue, and disgust where meaning collapses, that the spectator may re-establish her connection with her self. Discomfort is good for the psyche. Convenience causes brain atrophy.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>I dare you, tender reader, to cede your life of comfort and convenience to an hour of wordless self-association. Forsake your mediated identity for your meditative self. The Hindus call one form of meditation <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">yoga</i>—“with god.” In choosing to push yourself beyond words, expectations, and self-knowledge, you attain a one-ness with yourself, within and beyond your will. Mental yoga for us Westerners consists in dropping all associations, confronting the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ohm</i> of fear and white noise of desire that provide the bass-line for your life song. To hear this song, to confront the beast, to find the love that drives us and the fear that holds us back, we must immerse ourselves in dreadful, alien silence. You must forget what you think you know of yourself to know yourself. It will not be comfortable. It will not be fun. But you will know yourself. </div>Kendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1633939876718773965.post-24031697946621924042013-06-17T15:40:00.002-07:002013-06-17T19:24:04.494-07:00Waiting For Security to Come, or, BOYCOTT ROSKILDE“When I was fourteen,” my friend suddenly confided in me, “a gigantic guy climbed on top of me and wouldn’t let me go. He wanted to rape me. I didn’t fight him back sincerely, even then, because I was afraid I would hurt him.” I clamped my eyes shut and bit my lip in a sudden shockwave of acute anger and humiliation; her story sounded all too familiar. Far, far too close to home. I tensed my eyelids so hard I began to see things. I was probably red. I was probably shaking. I wouldn’t really know. Here we’d been friends all this time, and ten years after the assault, she finally felt emotionally safe enough to tell me. Not that I blame her; repression and denial are perhaps the most common means of dealing with an existential mini-death like sexual assault. Thanks to the privacy and safety awarded by the Internet chat we were using, I could cry to my heart’s content, snot and make up streaming down my glistening face—but I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">didn’t</i>cry. Not really. There was no contending my broken heart. No amount of tears could satiate my own horrible story from just last summer and its conjoined and prolonged sense of failure and humiliation. No cascade of salt water and make up could fix that tender hole in my heart that throbs and recoils when I think about the status of women.<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>“Last year,” I began, “my boyfriend Brett took me to a music festival in Denmark to see The Cure,” which has been one of my favorite bands for half of my life. “Of all the music festivals in Europe, it has the lowest rate of violent crime, including rape and sexual assault. It’s considered to be the safest festival in Europe. But it’s not. It has the lowest rate of reported violent crime because there’s no one to report it to.” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>“What’s the festival called?” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>“Roskilde.”&nbsp;</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3nClT4q4f6k/Ub-PwsoY5KI/AAAAAAAAAB8/6oUSU7yUsmc/s1600/IMG_0724.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3nClT4q4f6k/Ub-PwsoY5KI/AAAAAAAAAB8/6oUSU7yUsmc/s640/IMG_0724.jpg" width="480" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><a name='more'></a><br /><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>*</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>I suppose it was a warm night, by Danish standards; it was July, and the second official night of the festival, which had had about three days of outrageous partying that really shattered my naïve misconceptions of Scandinavians as passive, quiet, and polite. It was really wild—so wild, in fact, that a young man in our party died the first night after taking a mysterious pill and suffering a fatal seizure.&nbsp; Our gorgeous, wonderful, brilliant, inclusive Swedish friends who'd taken us there all went home immediately in shock and in mourning; Brett and I were left on our own in a strange country with surprisingly little ethnic diversity. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>We had never met the poor guy. We’d gone instead to check out Copenhägen for my first time, where I’d gotten sick and stayed a few extra days to see a doctor. The day of our return to the countryside, we got that dreadful phone call. We’d come all this way, and in all my many years as a dedicated Cure fan, I’d never had the chance to see them play. We <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">had</i>to stick around, at least for the four more days of the festival. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Anyway, I’d been saying—I suppose it was a warm night, by Danish standards. I was still high on bliss from seeing The Cure the night before, in the third row, reeling and swooning over every note for the entire four-hour duration, which Brett and I barely made it through due to our all-too-human bladder capacities. I cried with joy for the entire performance. It was the most perfect moment of my life, and it just kept going and going, encore after encore, favorite song after favorite song. Brett told me he loved me. I told him I knew. My body vibrated, inundated with overwhelming love and gratitude. Nothing could ever compare to the transcendent exaltation I felt that gorgeous, glorious night. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>But our story takes place the following night; a night spent slightly disappointed by Jack White’s arrogant and solipsistic performance; a night spent feeling cocky and self-entitled, pretending to be more inebriated than I actually was to exploit the infamous passiveness of the Scandinavians and cut to the front row. It worked beautifully. I feel no guilt because I am a New Yorker, and the idea that someone ought not to get to the front of the show no matter his or her time of arrival seems illogical to me. I also knew that this mild selfishness was a good exercise for me, because I tend to be too altruistic, too polite, and thus end up trampled underfoot with a pointless scowl on my face. I believe this to be not so much the human condition as the condition of the meek. This night, however, was different. This night, I remembered my worth firmly and didn’t feel the need to accommodate strangers. I could finally experience that supposedly masculine state of not caring, of selfishness that doesn’t come at the expense of others. This, I told myself, was the summer of the meek. And the only way to take it was to overcome my meekness. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>After the show, Brett and I waded, arms wrapped around each other’s waists, through crushed plastic cups, food containers, napkins, toilet paper, food, and probably the unspeakable, which we had to ignore to survive on a conceptual level. The garbage came up to our ankles. The field was wet and muddy from two days of intermittent rain, and we’d come prepared with galoshes and an adopted attitude of selective Nihilism. Despite my friends’ tragedy, I was at a personal pinnacle of happiness, and I wasn’t about to give that up. I needed it. We bought ourselves each a cup of beer and made our way over to another stage where a local rap band was to be playing. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>We never made it to see that band. Swooning in our walking embrace, emanating love for each other, I was suddenly attacked by an older teenager from behind, who hit both my buttocks like he was playing the bongos. I broke out of my embrace with Brett, enraged, and yelled, “That guy just touched my ass!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Brett walked right up to him. “Did you touch her? I said, ‘Did you touch her?!’”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>With a smile that could only be described by the word “jackass” the gangly blonde man in his Adidas track suit hee-hawed with pride. I demanded an apology and got right in his face. As passive as I can sometimes be, I never have been remotely docile when it comes to crossing the line. If anything, I save all my pent-up rage for moments like these. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>From the shadows, perhaps summoned by the jackass’s self-conscious bawing, the vile, disgusting little boy’s eleven friends emerged out of the darkness. Our jackass, Aggressor Number One, hid behind them while they belligerently demanded what was going on and threatened to kill us. “We are twelve, and you are two,” one said in an accented staccato. “Just walk away. Walk away. We will kill you.” So we did. I hated it. I was writhing with anger. But we did. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>We hadn’t even gone five steps when the jackass came back to play bongos on my ass a second time. Without thinking I threw my entire beer right in his face, as hard as I could. I will never forget the gorgeous spin on that plastic cup, played on repeat in slow motion in the archives of memory, as their faces morphed from triumphant to dismayed, arms up and limp—posed like the little Vietnamese girl running naked, covered in napalm—as the beer soaked about five of them. They never dropped their malevolent expressions. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>What happened next happened so fast I can’t really recall it. To be brief, Brett and I were beaten up by all twelve of those nasty little Eurotrash gangsters in their matching Adidas tracksuits and visors. I was thrown in the mud, time and again, my bloody hands searching in the darkness for my glasses before the boys could stomp on them. An uninvolved man tried to stop the violence, pushed Brett and I away from those boys (which initially only enraged me further), and whispered that he had already called Security and they should be on their way. We kept the boys around for several minutes, waiting for Security to come. It was like waiting for Godot.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">I did seize the hugely rewarding opportunity to punch three of these heinous misogynists in the face during this fight. But for some reason, probably due to my conditioning as a child, I never hit them where it count, or as hard as I could. Even as Brett and I were being hit, kicked, and slammed to the ground, I aimed time and again for the jaw, not the Adam’s apple, not the stomach; not the eyes, nor the nose, nor the groin. I didn’t want to hurt them. Hearing my old friend say almost exactly this the other day, a perpetual quiver ran down my spine. How many of us women don’t fight back in these situations because we’re afraid to hurt someone? </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Globally, violence against women is more likely to cause injury and death than car crashes, cancer, malaria, and war <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">combined, </i>according to statistics from UNICEF<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. </i>Femicide is the third leading cause of death in pregnant women. Globally, one in five women is raped between the ages of twelve and 24; in the U.S., it’s more like one in six, but in South Africa a disturbing 40% of women have admitted to having suffered from this kind of violence. I have known for years now that I am more likely to be killed by a man than a car. I have known for years now not to be docile when being attacked. I have known for years now that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">women weaned on modesty are contemporary flagellants. </i>But I have only known this conceptually. It has floated like a balloon, abstract, irrelevant, in the chaos of my superego. Perhaps it floated out of my reach.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">I feel like a Madonna-whore; I feel as though I have grown against my will into this projected identity placed over my body like a coffin-crown from before the time I myself had a gender identity. I feel angry, frustrated, internally and externally defeated. How could I have protected my saboteurs, like some selfless mother, even as they tried to maim my boyfriend and me? How could I still have had the benefit of the doubt as they threatened our lives? For days, I fumed. I cried. I hated. But with time, the tide of my blood has come to smooth the edges of those jagged boulders of self-blame and self-doubt. I came to realize that I was, in fact, blaming myself—and this is the most pathological defeat of them all. As a feminist—even as a woman who doesn’t identify as a feminist—to blame oneself is the final frontier of institutionalized sexism. I am not the sickness. I am the immune system. And I have not yet lost. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">We got beaten up for several more minutes. Some girls got involved and of course immediately took the Danish boys’ side. One girl put her arm around Aggressor Number One, the jackass, and proclaimed that he was her boyfriend and he’d never hit me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>“You are a weak woman!” I screamed. “You would defend a man who touches women like this? Do you let him touch <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you </i>like this? What kind of girlfriend would allow that?”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">She continued to call me a “bitch” and a “slut.” Though the idea that the victim of sexual violence would be a “slut” absolutely and objectively defies logic, this concept is somehow neither new nor uncommon, even in places rumored to be more feminist and more egalitarian, like Scandinavia. This logic runs rampant in North America. In fact, three teenaged girls committed suicide this year after being assaulted or raped while unconscious, only to discover photos of the crime circulating social media. The rapists were high-fived and defended by teachers and principals. The girls were taunted and tormented, stabbed with that four-letter hate word, until they took their own lives. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slut. Slut. Slut. Slit. </i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slut. </i>I wish that archaic word in all its woman-hating gore and glory would take its own life instead, and its toxic connotations with it. It scares me that people at large still believe that a woman in charge of her sexuality is the most menacing concept on the planet. “Cunt,” the word for our genitalia, is considered the most <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">offensive</i> one—more than rape, more than murder. We are raised in a world that tells us to be sexy without being sexual, to be virginal and innocent in all our efforts to be “hot.” It hopes to prime us to be raped. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“I’m not afraid of you!” I remember screaming to the girl, “Come here and fight me!” Of course, she never did. She kept screaming that I was bleeding because I got drunk and fell. I told her she would obviously never convince me of that and reminded her that she wasn’t even there and it was none of her business. But of course, my words were useless. Logic has little do to with sexism.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">The boys loomed ever nearer, threatening to come back for round three. “SECURITY! SECURITY!” I kept screaming, desperately. Brett was limping. Some girls at a table nearby started laughing, exaggeratedly. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Securiteeeee! Securiteeee!”</i> they mocked. I shot them unfiltered hate from my eye beams. Why weren’t these women on my side? Is it really so much more of a social sin to stand up for yourself when being assaulted than to assault someone? I thought Scandinavia was supposed to be more egalitarian, more feminist than the United States. That night, I learned that Scandinavia is only more egalitarian because it’s more homogenous, that to stand out there is unpardonable.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">As I’m sure you have guessed by now, Security never came. I had rocks embedded in my bleeding hands and Brett was hobbling like a veteran. Still shaking with rage too thorough to cry, I sought out some personnel in day-glo vests. I didn’t yet know that those people are just regular young men and women who volunteer to “work” at Roskilde for a free ticket. When I told one woman my story and pointed out the boys, triumphantly and casually walking away, she said, “So, what do you want me to do about it?”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“Kick them out!” I replied, thinking it the most obvious thing in the world. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“I don’t haff ze authority to do zat,” she replied coolly. Another woman not remotely on my side. I couldn’t believe so many misogynists were here, so excited to see Bjork headline in two days. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bjork would be furious, </i>I told myself. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“Oh, but you have the authority to search our purses?” I snapped. No answer, of course, from her. But another man in a day-glo vest approached us and asked what was wrong. Barely composed, I told him our story. He laughed at us. Hard. It seemed like a fake laugh, a self-preserving laugh. A condescending laugh. I was blinded with fury.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“Let’s go back to America, Brett, where Bjork <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lives </i>because it’s so much better than Scandinavia.” I admit, closed-minded words; it is hard to demonstrate a shining example of political correctness in the wake of an attack based on one’s gender. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">All that night and all the next day, I hid in our tent. My tears ran thick and feverish. Brett was in no condition to walk to the train and get out of this dystopia. I was refused medical help at all for my hands when I had asked, and was unwilling to leave the tent and face that virus of humanity for at least a full day. They became obviously infected. It occurred to me that my festering wounds were my Feminist Stigmata. In this I found some solace and some pride--I felt like a martyr for my cause. I knew I'd done the right thing.&nbsp;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">When I finally did leave the tent and get help, the man who dug out what we thought was another rock but was just a gigantic ball of pus asked how I did it. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">When I told him my story he asked if I learned anything. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">That day, I saw two police officers walking around. “Excuse me,” I called. One put up his hand in a halting motion and told me, “Not now.” They walked on. And by “not now,” they really meant “not ever.” </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">I was left ignored, contemplating anarchy in a society that still has police that barely even exist on a symbolic level. I had experienced something like that at Burning Man, but at Burning Man I’d never been beaten or threatened at all. I only felt safe walking around naked in a microcosmos of love, art, equality, and respect. I have yet to elucidate by written word my conclusions as to why these two festivals provide such opposite extreme reactions to essential lawlessness. But those musings will come at another time. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">There is a direct point to this story, and it isn’t self-pity. The point is, Roskilde is an unsafe festival where violence and bigotry go unaddressed to the point of encouragement. It is rampant with this sort of xenophobia where anyone who stands out, regardless of ethnicity, is the alien. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i>. The existential enemy. The only answer to this is to boycott Roskilde. I am sharing this story with you because I don’t want this to keep happening to outsiders every year as punishment for having the courage to travel, expecting to have a good time and see beloved bands. I am sharing this story with you because Roskilde hates women. So I ask of you, attendees, bands, fellow humans: boycott Roskilde. Please don’t pay or play for them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>While I spent weeks in shock and in mourning for some small personal death, I finally did come to the conclusion that the heinous bigotry I experienced should not be allowed to ruin my summer. Nothing can soil the perfect night of watching the Cure with my darling, ecstatic and awe-struck, pulsating pure love. Even though Brett and I were beaten up that terrible night, I still got to spend an incredible six weeks traveling Europe, visiting old friends, seeing bands I love. I refuse to let this experience soil that summer because that kind of defeat is the end goal of sexism, and I refuse to participate. </div>Kendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1633939876718773965.post-59138461066463015442013-05-25T13:32:00.001-07:002013-05-28T11:37:39.775-07:00Conquoring Butt Shame: How New Orleans' Sissy Bounce Scene Helped Me Discover My Body<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uBZPenQmN3Q/UaEfJNcH9aI/AAAAAAAAABo/YLkwlNcAxWY/s1600/big-freedia-bend-over-ass1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="424" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uBZPenQmN3Q/UaEfJNcH9aI/AAAAAAAAABo/YLkwlNcAxWY/s640/big-freedia-bend-over-ass1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><i> <style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; panose-1:0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} </style></i>--&gt; <br /><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"></div><div class="MsoNormal">You know what I find so empowering about Big Freedia? Well, you see, all my life I had butt shame. I was ashamed of my ass for being too big and too nice—a giant, constant attractor of unwanted attention—you know, the kind of unwanted attention that blames the victim for attracting it in the first place and for not knowing how to react. I’ve never had an eating disorder, but I was always very conscious of how big my butt was. I monitored it obsessively by trying on different pairs of shorts and seeing how they fit. I did this every day, all my life. And then I discovered Big Freedia, transgendered pioneer of the New Orleans-based Sissy Bounce scene.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">“Bend over!” the self-proclaimed Queen Diva demanded in a booming, maternal voice. “I want ass everywhere, ass everywhere!” From here she transitioned into the song of the same title, and a sea of asses of every shape, texture, and color thrust into the air, immodestly clad, celebrating seemingly autonomous lives as they rippled and bounced to the rhythms of gluteal freedom. We call this dance, I later learned, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">twerking</i>. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><a name='more'></a><br /><div class="MsoNormal">Big Freedia may particularly glorify giant asses with her and her dance crew’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">twerking</i>, but really she celebrates all asses, with a method that frees everyone to express one’s sexuality in a completely non-self-critical way. There has never been another venue in which I have felt so safe, so free—so proud!—that I could just enact that primordial desire to shake what our post-Christian culture insists is so inherently evil about the body. Shake it without harassment from strangers who assume it’s an open invitation or a desperate call for mating. Shake it free of the stigma of ebullient existence. Shake it free of all the unwanted attention. Shake it free of all the shame. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twerk!</i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Nothing has ever felt so empowering and so innately <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">right </i>as tipping the Richter scale with my posterior at a Big Freedia show along with everyone else, owning the moment in a room of kindred spirits also owning the moment. We all <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">twerk</i> together, liberated, safe: sexual creatures not necessarily looking for sex, conscious only of our own personal transcendence from shame, relatively unaware of how other people look. The natural physics of the universe are let loose on two hemispheres with a lot of mass and gravitational pull, reminiscent of the breasts of a burlesque dancer as her tassels twirl in ecstatic unison. It’s seismic. It’s gorgeous. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Big Freedia shows are truly some of the only genuinely feminist gatherings I’ve ever gone to—free of dogma, free of finger-pointing, free of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i>ing. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Today, we live in a world where most women would not casually identify as Feminists. Not only has the term been irrevocably stigmatized, but contemporary young women are no longer even certain what “Feminism” means. Is it the basic understanding that women are humans and equally as valuable as men? Or has it become a political platform, no more concerned with its initial constitution seeking equality than Democrats are concerned with emphasizing state rights or Republicans with federal rights? Do we capitalize the F? Excuse me, lady, but who are you to tell me I can’t be a Feminist <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and </i>wear flashy, showy clothing? That sounds like the Madonna-whore complex to me, which is barely a complex because we already know there is no way to win. I refuse to play by those rules. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I feel that women so frequently forget that underneath the layers of unspeakable but not unspoken resentment, under all the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">italicized undermeanings </i>and arbitrary emphases, under all the dog-eat-dog betrayal and manipulation inherent to a misogynistic environment where women are pitted against each other in a sort of potential-girlfriend-Olympics all the time, we are really just complicated creatures, constantly demonized. Demonized not just by men and by our culture, but by ourselves and each other. This is why I so adamantly stamp on slut-shaming. This is why I do not indulge in shit-talking women. I don’t like that petty, gendered bullshit, and if you care about our progress as a civilization, you don’t like it either. It only engenders more hate, and creates more archetypes of femininity to shrug off and dehumanize.<br /><br />Let’s tune out the stereotypes. Let’s sit and be with ourselves, and figure out on an individual level how much of each of us is influenced by estrogen. After all, men have estrogen too—and women testosterone. I scarcely believe we are so inherently different on a biological level; like so many other minorities, we are only living up to a projected identity so that we can be shot down and taxonomized. Truly, this is a vicious cycle, but instead of taking feminist rhetoric from the seventies, or the eighties, or the nineties, or whatever wave and using our list of lamentations as excuses, we ought to do our own part as individuals to break the cycle. I, for example, try to educate people, especially men, on the fundamental concept of Feminism: that women are humans, just like men. No more, no less. Different, but equal. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">To a brain that can understand equations or put them into context in a less abstracted situation, it is obvious, empirical, evident that two things can be equal but different. We seem to believe the misconception that this is not so is just fundamental Capitalism. It isn’t—it’s ignorance. Ignorance and pride. How is it that so many people can understand on a piece of paper that x = 2, and that the two are fundamentally different, and yet can’t understand that woman = man in exactly the same way? We are measuring value here, humans! Stop lamenting in echoes of who you would or could be if not for the status quo. We <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are </i>the status quo. Own it! </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">But all of these musings and epiphanies really come back full circle to the loudest, most loving and most self-aware hypocrite in the room: me. Me and my butt shame. Me and my un-will to own my ass proudly and accept that the terms and conditions of such include to know how to shut out creeps. Me, neck craned awkwardly over my shoulder as I inspect my perhaps sagging, perhaps cellulitic rump in the mirror obsessively at age twenty-four, deeply regretting that I didn’t shake that ass more six years ago and resenting girls I assume to be vapid for doing just that. But I know that even as I sit here and make my findings personal, that the personal is universal. After all, “personal” denotes that these are aspects inherent to persons. We are all people. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I hope you can come away from my story enlightened and self-loving, instead of defensive and confused, contemplating how best to shoot down each of my arguments based on their specificity one by one, simply because it isn’t easy and doesn’t let you off the hook. But I also hope you remember that everything you do in life you should do because you love it and you want to. This includes the most arduous chores and the staunchest discipline: you do these because you love them. I clean the litter box because I like to clean and I love my cat. I don’t have to hate it; I can love it. I gaze with detached and general love upon perfectly-formed eighteen-year-olds in booty shorts because I love Feminism and I’m passionate about equality. I don’t have to hate the status quo. I am the status quo. And I love myself. </div><br /><br /><i>[Reblogged from my <a href="http://decibeljezebel.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Tumblr</a>.]</i><br /><br /><br />Kendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1633939876718773965.post-71049664099797503242013-05-23T23:07:00.000-07:002013-06-17T19:23:08.610-07:00Allow me to introduce myself. Hello, world. My name is Kendalle Fiasco. Perhaps you know me already--maybe you've seen me around metropolitan areas with my Willy Wonka boyfriend in <a href="http://lookbook.nu/kendallefiasco" target="_blank">lavish and complicated outfits</a>, or maybe you've seen my <a href="http://kendallefiasco.com/" target="_blank">mutant deer sculpture installation</a> in articles or terrorizing people at festivals, parties, or galleries. Perchance a glimmer of recognition sparks behind your eyes because you've seen me start a flame war on at least one of various internet forums, brazenly opining and getting all in a tizzy about quality and equality. I hope to bring you quality, equality, and e-quality.<br /><br />I am a woman of many opinions and autonomous philosophies. I am an artist, a theorist, and a semiotech. Other than that, I will barely identify myself; I believe identity is just an abbreviation of the self, and I wouldn't want you to typecast me as right/wrong/misguided/brilliant before you've given your open mind and I a chance to get to know each other. This is just the beginning of our relationship laden with laughs, tears, rage, drama, plot twists, and all the other unpredictable predicaments typical and transcendent of a sitcom. I hope you will find the courage and confidence to drop your character and surprise us both.<br /><br />I am always pleased to have a sane, logical, respectful discourse if you happen not to agree with me on something. Please avoid ad hominem, though, because I may well verbally cut out your liver and destroy you. My propensity to do so has earned me the epithet of <a href="http://decibeljezebel.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Decibel Jezebel</a>. I am not a particularly mean person until I have been pushed beyond the bounds of my patience. A snarling darling. Yes.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Welcome to The Complete Fiasco!&nbsp;</b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-163VAEI1ALA/UZ8CyBM-xFI/AAAAAAAAAAM/d-_bpEBon1g/s1600/CirqueDuSade.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-163VAEI1ALA/UZ8CyBM-xFI/AAAAAAAAAAM/d-_bpEBon1g/s640/CirqueDuSade.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><br />Kendalle Aubrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06052995080519459704noreply@blogger.com0